Paradiso

A man goes for a walk with his dog through the streets, paths, woods, fields and along the river near a small village in the Sienese hills. Every day, for many seasons, the man and the dog learn and discover something, stumble upon new adventures. This creates a sort of concert of three voices, where the third, omnipresent and silent, but not quite, is that of the landscape. An apparently uncorrupted nature, sometimes protective, sometimes subtly disturbing, but always able to transcend, or cover up, the painful pain of living. Paradise is here, this book seems to say, almost in defiance of the sadness and negativity of much of today’s poetry. Yet there is no removal of the contemporary individual and collective drama, which instead remains very much present, but as if it had indeed been overcome and relegated to the background by a kind of superior, adult wisdom. Stefano Dal Bianco’s affable and magnetic voice achieves here a rare happiness of lyrical pronunciation, and confirms itself as a must for anyone wishing to orient themselves in the very rich spectrum of Italian poetry.